Partisanship is not a crime

May 20, 2014

Laura Mordaunt

OPINION By LAURA MORDAUNT

Nonpartisan is a word that has been used as a weapon in the 4th district race. What is intended is to not predetermine the outcome before you hear all the facts. Lynn Compton is a Republican, and Caren Ray and Mike Byrd are Democrats, period.

When has it been a crime to be in a party? The crime comes when the party is not about your character and honor but about control. When your party, left or right, becomes a progressive effort to move away from what this country was founded upon and expand government, then we have a problem.

Lynn Compton is a supporter of smaller government. Caren Ray is part of the progressive left wanting bigger government. Nonpartisan should mean you shall uphold your oath to protect our country and county from foreign and domestic enemies. Right now, I am concerned with the domestic enemies of private property rights, the individual and prosperity.

Lynn Compton has signed both sides of a paycheck and knows how over-regulation and increased fees harm businesses and kill jobs. So, do not be fooled by this word nonpartisan. Instead, look at the real world experience and vote for Lynn Compton for supervisor.

Laura Mordaunt is a retired systems engineer and math teacher and is a member of the SLO County Republican Central Committee.

29 Comments

i would like to address the ‘domestic enemies’ of Ms. Mourdant’s partisan screed.

For way too long, this nation has not come to grips with the vast powers of the money masters…the rich that take and take, and accumulate more and more by a systematic and corrupt control of the electoral process and tax policies that steal from the common good to futher advance the hegemony of the richest…increasing the vast hordes of wealth of the few; while impoverishing and making virtual slaves among the neglected, the downtrodden, the now illusory ‘middle class’.

This “Power Elite” are the true ‘enemies’ of democracy and the false promise of “the American dream”.

She CLAIMS to be independent, but then trumpets her Republican background and sources as some kind of justification.

Can’t have it both ways, Ms. Compton. ….Either you are TRULY independent, and only subservient to your contituents of ALL political affiliations, or you are a political hack at the beck and call of just ONE political faction….and that an extremist reactionary one in today’s landscape.

My observation? She’s the latter.

Voters of the Fourth Supervisoral District in SLO County….you want a clone of Debbie Arnold that will only vote along Party lines ? Then vote for Compton.

I do have to admire how Republicans can always be counted on to demonize the term “progressive”, throwing the term around like it is some sort of nasty word, and how all “progressives” are out to have the government take over complete control, eliminate capitalism and put every single citizen on an equal footing; of course, the “truth” is far from the simplistic character that Republicans love to drone on and on about. While most conservatives have very similar views about the role of government and that of big business, liberals, middle-of-the-road Democrats, conservative Democrats and even dedicated progressives like myself have a very wide and differing view on the role of government and business.

Since I am not a political leader and can claim to speak for no one but myself, let me state plainly and clearly that I do not think that big government is the end-all to be-all; I do believe however that there are definite roles government can and should play. I am not for an ever-expanding government, I am for an efficient government that can fulfill the role of doing what individuals cannot do, like building and maintaining roads, bridges, highways; you know, infrastructure that allows for individuals and businesses to be able to move about freely and to transport goods and people and even be able to make a profit doing so. But those same roads have to be able to be maintained and even expanded at times, and that funding has to come from somewhere, so we have taxes to pay for those.

I am for our country to be able to defend our national interests, both at home and abroad; it does seem odd to me though that many times our “national interests” seem to be the same as some multi-national, for-profit corporations, many of whom don’t seem to pay much, if any, in taxes to support their interests being protected.

I fully support the right of every single citizen to vote, even if they have been convicted of a major crime, after they have paid their debt to society, and find it offensive that so many states, so many counties have pursued an agenda of voter intimidation based on the extremely rare instances of voter fraud.

If anyone really wants to debate on the merits of the conservative agenda versus a progressive agenda, I would welcome the opportunity to do so. Conservatism is a racket, plain and simple; to continue to beat the drum for smaller and less and less government, less oversight, less regulation is exactly what has lead us down the bad road we are currently on with the top 400 richest families in America owning 40 % of our nation’s wealth. Our country was at its’ strongest when we had the strongest middle class in the world, but 40+ years of Reaganomics have stripped our country of that distinction; conservative policies put in place by Republican politicians ( and some by less-than-liberal Democrats, like President Clinton signing in to law the repeal of the Glass-Stiegal Act) have caused the richest to get even richer and the poor to get even poorer, and to dismantle the middle class to the point of many adults in their 20s, 30s and even their 40s not even having a chance to afford buying the largest purchase most people make, a home.

So yes, I am a progressive who feels that there is a role that government should play; do I feel that President Obama is doing everything I would like him to do? Sadly, he is not even close, neither is Bruce Gibson or Adam Hill; I would label all of them as corporatist Democrats who will occasionally incorporate some progressive ideals when it suits them, but for the most part they will do the bidding of business people over the interests of the average citizen.

And conservatives? It seems to me the agenda there is to cripple the effectiveness of government so more and more functions can be privatized allowing the corporations to make more and more profit, increasing the gap between the rich and the not-so-rich, the not-rich, and especially the poor. The largest employment sector is going to be in service industries, not in actually making things here in the United States, and conservatives couldn’t be happier about that.What have conservative policies done for the average citizen to allow them to be able to make their life better? Cutting food stamps? Eliminating welfare? Closing most mental health facilities? Building up our war machine so that we spend more on our military than the next twenty countries combined? Kept us safe from terrorist attacks on American soil? (Who was president on 9/11?) As I see it, conservative policies have failed the majority of American citizens, over and over.

How about it, can anyone defend the conservative agenda with verifiable facts and backing data?

I will also be interested to read a conservative response to your well-written and, from where I sit after having spent 50 years as a “conservative” Republican, extremely accurate description of today’s GOP. The “response”, in my experience, is to either ignore the challenge or to change the subject, because there is no defense.

Words can have many different meanings . . . how they are strung together and backed by action is what gives them credibility. It isn’t the size of the government, it is the equality of the government. It isn’t the about government control, it’s about regulating the excesses of self-interest. It isn’t about private property rights and prosperity, it’s about the prosperity of a few at the expense of the majority. It isn’t about character and honor, it’s about deceit and greed. And it certainly isn’t about the individual, it’s about corporate advancement.

I mostly agree with the first half of the opinion piece and somewhat with the second half. I don’t yet know how much of a BIG government person Caren Ray is. Yes, she is a member of a party that leans more that way than the GOP but what about her individual views? Does she share some and reject others or is she obediently partisan in all her actions? Incidentally, the GOP is also for BIG government. They’re just more inclined to channel more funds to their corporation backers through the Dept. of Defense or outright tax cuts instead of tossing a few bones to the poor (deserving or not.) Democrats are more subtle about repaying their corporate backers.

However, I also find myself sharing GBG’s opinion about the dominant effect of corporate control in the upper levels of government and the danger that provides to the common citizen. It is just that the Democrats are damn near as supportive of this as the Republicans. They just lie about their real policies to their voters instead of brainwashing them into supporting their actions like the GOP does with its voters.

So, while partisanship as presented in this article is not a crime — or even unethical in any legal sense — it should be a warning to voters that the person taking pride in it may be more devoted to the “party line” than to independent thought and the best interests of their constituents.

This is a silly article. It starts off by telling us there’s something about “nonpartisan,” though it’s hard to tell just what, but the article’s entire purpose seems to be to tell us who’s Republican, and who’s not, and that somebody or other has signed both sides of a paycheck, whatever that’s supposed to signify. Very good logic, there, but then what can we expect from the RCC?

I will not comment on Ms.Mordaunt’s political opinions but highly compliment her statement of fact that you can put a (D) or an (R) after every SLO County supervisor or serious candidate, and I will add “going back 50 years” to that It adds more gravitas to my crusade to stop people from believing this “non-partisan” charade. Seriously, it’s like everybody pretending to believe in the tooth fairy, it’s that ridiculous. Both sides emphasize the vast majority of 5-0 votes. That’s because most votes are on routine housekeeping that don’t (sic) mean s**t. Anything that does and I’ll tell you ahead of time what the split vote will be.

Wish Ms. Compton was running in district 2, we would certainly vote for her. Do anything to get rid of Mr. I do not know how to keep my penis in my pants Gibson and the rest of his clones such as. Mayor”lets have another closed door meeting” Irons, Council members Noah “I am really excited about having 96 meetings talking about things, but getting nothing done” Schmuckler, and Christine “does my hair look alright?”Johnson. District 2 is in BIG BIG trouble.You in district 4 are oh so lucky to have someone with the brains and fortitude such as Lynn Compton.

The opinion read, “Lynn Compton is a supporter of smaller government”, but should read “Lynn Compton, republican, is a supporter of smaller government while her party supports larger corporate control and influence with absolutely no real or meanigful oversight in sight”

Smaller government doesn’t mean NO government, Ms. Mordaunt, and that’s exactly what the republican party gives us, nothing.

As opposed to the Democrats who are the party of take everything, from the taxpayers that is. So given only these choices I will take the party of nothing from the party of take everything, because at this point I already have enough taken.

Let’s put the Republican in the same light, the light of taking (and please, these are just some readily available examples):

In 2011, Republican state lawmakers in Wyoming introduced a bill that would allow restaurants and other employers to force their serving staff to pool their tips. Serving staff in that state, and many others, are paid the federal sub-minimum wage for tipped workers of $2.13 per hour because they’re supposed to make up the rest in tips. (the poverty rate among waiters and waitresses is 250 percent higher than it is among the general work force as the tips they receive very seldom makes up the difference in pay). The bill went on to lower the pay of the non-tipped staff in those same businesses to the federal sub-minimum wage and force the pooled tips to be shared by all staff. Lets see; splitting less money among more people? Now, that’s the truest sense of Republicans sharing the poverty, oops! I meant the riches, right?

Just one more, this time in the area of Employer Time Theft (just now gaining national attention. And I’m going to just cut-and-paste this one as not to miss any of the pertinent facts):

Wage theft refers to the practice among employers of taking money from their employees by illegally paying them less than the minimum wage or not paying them overtime. According to one multi-city study, in a single week, nearly two-thirds of low-wage workers had, on average, 15 percent of their pay stolen by their employers.

One of the causes of this epidemic of wage theft that involves sums “far greater than the combined total stolen in all the bank robberies, gas station robberies, and convenience store robberies in the country” is lax enforcement of the country’s wage and hour laws. In 1941, there was one federal inspector for every 11,000 workers. As of 2008, there was one for every 141,000 workers. “The average employer has just a 0.001 percent chance of being investigated in a given year,” The study went on to say because there is so little risk of getting caught, one-third of all employers who have been found guilty of violating wage and hour laws continue to do it.

In 2010, liberal legislators in Miami-Dade County decided to take matters into their own hands. They passed an anti-wage-theft ordinance, resulting in more than 600 prosecutions and $1.7 million recovered in stolen pay in the first year alone. Miami-Dade’s success inspired Broward and Palm Beach Counties to propose similar measures.

In response, Republican legislators in Tallahassee tried to pass a bill that would prohibit any “county, municipality, or political subdivision of the state” from enacting laws, rules, ordinances or regulations “for the purpose of addressing wage theft.” They failed, so they tried again. This time, the bill passed the Florida House, but failed in the Senate.

Republican’s less government is just a smoke screen for making it harder to get caught, especially for their bigger donors.

Ms. Mordaunt, your letter is word soup. Expanded government, big government, blah blah blah, all words, all name-calling and broad-brush without a single example to back you up and this, Ms. Mordaunt, is exactly why your brand of “partisanship” is annoying. You want us to vote for Compton because she’s a Republican, and to shun Ray and Byrd because they’re Democrats. That’s not enough. Tell me what Ray wants to expand, and tell me what Compton wants to reduce, and we can talk about compromise, common ground and common good.

What if I try it your way?

“Lynn Compton is a supporter of fascism, taking away a woman’s right to govern her own health care and she supports pollution. Caren Ray is part of a progressive society that cares about families and working people.”

I certainly hope no thinking person would swallow what I just fed them, just as I hope that your bucket of swill will be left to its own putrescence.